Patients with Alzheimer's disease use metamemory to attenuate the Jacoby-Whitehouse illusion

Abstract

Patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) relying predominantly on familiarity for recognition, research has suggested that they may be particularly susceptible to memory illusions driven by conceptual fluency. Using the Jacoby and Whitehouse [Jacoby, L.L., & Whitehouse, K. (1989). An illusion of memory: False recognition influenced by unconscious perception. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 118, 126-135] illusion paradigm, we extended these findings and found that AD patients were also sensitive to perceptually driven false recognition. However, AD patients were equally able to disregard perceptual fluency when there was a shift in the sensory modality of the study and test stages. Overall, these findings support the notion that patients with AD can be susceptible to fluency-based memory illusions but these patients can strategically control the fluency attribution following their metamemory expectation in exactly the same way as elderly adults and young adults.